Is Kim Kardashian’s Skims Worth $5 Billion?

Let’s start with a simple question that somehow became complicated.Is Skims actually worth $5 billion, or is Goldman overpaying for the Kardashian effect?

Because here is the truth . One billion dollars of that valuation is attributed directly to Kim Kardashian’s fame. Not the product. Not the margin profile. Not the retail footprint. Fame.

A billion dollars tied to a single person’s cultural gravity and relevance should make anyone in this industry pause. And yet, this is not the first time the market has assigned a premium like this. The problem is that we have very few clean comps for what fame is actually worth. Celebrity brands are either tiny and noisy or large but messy.

That changed when the Rhode acquisition dropped. Suddenly we had a modern, scaled beauty brand with real numbers and a public buyer whose valuation math we can track. It gave us the perfect comparison. Hailey Bieber is one of the most commercially effective celebrities in beauty and even her premium shakes out at about $300 million when you benchmark Rhode against e.l.f.’s trading multiple. Meanwhile Kim Kardashian clocks in at $1 billion.

This case study is about understanding whether that gap is real or inflated. And more importantly, whether Kim’s premium is sustainable as Skims expands beyond shape wear and loungewear into categories that are not native to her, or she has struggled in. Think beauty, which she has tried to build twice before with limited success.